Anna in the Afterlife Read Online Free PDF Page A

boogie-woogie. She would suffocate them with Rachmaninoff. She would keep the image of Anna, as she needed it, shined bright as a silver candlestick.
    Now Sammy lay in a closed cedar wood coffin in the Vale-Of-Tears Chapel while some girl rabbi was addressing a sad little crew of seven or eight mourners. Janet and Carol, who had to be there anyway to make arrangements for the disposition of Anna, had decided to pay respects to Sammy, as well as to see how funerals were done, the better to plan for their mother’s in two days.
    Although Anna had no doubts that women were superior to men in every way and her general scorn for rabbis was unshakable, she could see no reason why this little rabbinette, this homely girl with a quavering voice, this skinny maruchka , should be standing there in the place of some old rebbe with a long white beard. A funeral speech required some experience—how could you talk about death if you were barely out of bobbie socks? Besides, the girl was ungifted. She spoke pure boilerplate: “Samuel Mishkin was a good husband, a good father, a good family man.”
    To take a fee for this kind of trash was highway robbery.
    Sammy’s two daughters sat looking at their laps, having God knows what memories of their father. What did Anna know except that their relations with him were not so good. The problem had partly to do with how many blonde women he favored after he divorced their mother—and in such fast succession. Still, all the mourners looked baffled and offended at the paucity of what could be found to be said about the dead man.
    Anna would have said plenty: how he pressed flowers from the desert blooms into the pages of books, how he helped the old people at the senior center to do their taxes (he had been an accountant and a good one). How he had a fine appreciation of Mozart (which could not be said of every accountant).
    The girl rabbi was already opening her little booklet (the one the mortuary gave to everyone) to say some prayer when Anna’s daughter, Janet, stood up in the pew with her hand raised.
    â€œExcuse me, but would you mind if I said a few words about Sammy? He and my mother were very good friends for over thirty years.” The first wife looked worried, as if news of another blonde bombshell were going to come out of the woodwork, but her older daughter whispered something to her that cleared up the matter. “Please do say something,” Sammy’s daughter urged Janet, who took the podium.
    â€œAfter my father died, Sammy’s friendship brightened my mother’s life. He stopped in often at her antique shop. He took her on beautiful nature walks in the desert.” (Anna was relieved she did not mention the lunches of hard boiled eggs.) “The two of them often went to concerts together and listened to records of classical music, which they both adored. One Halloween Sammy came to our house just as we were about to go trick-or-treating with our three little girls. We still have the picture of Sammy with them, sitting on the couch between the wicked witch and the fairy godmother, with the baby, Little Bo Peep, on his lap.”
    Sammy’s daughters were dabbing at their eyes. His first wife was nodding her head. Even the new lady friend was smiling sadly.
    Anna was proud of Janet, making something decent out of this affair. She said a little prayer to no one: “She should only do as well for me.
    An enormous Russian woman with a gold ring on every finger turned out to be the “grief counselor” for Anna’s bereaved girls. She had long red fingernails and wore a flowing chiffon pantsuit that sparkled with silver threads. Opening her notebook, she began gathering facts:
    â€œSo, of course your mother was Jewish?”
    â€œYes, Jewish,” Janet said.
    â€œSo—her Jewish name please.”
    Anna’s girls were nonplussed. “What was Mom’s Jewish name?”
    â€œI think it was something like